Method and Metaphysics

Jonathan Barnes was educated at the City of London School and at Balliol College. For 25 years he taught at Oxford, being a Fellow first of Oriel and then of Balliol. He then spent eight years at the University of Geneva, before becoming Professor of Ancient Philosophy at the Sorbonne. He is a Fellow of the British Academy, and of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. His many publications include The Ontological Argument (Macmillan, 1972); Aristotle's Posterior Analytics (Clarendon Press, 2nd edition 1993); Aristotle (OUP, 1982); The Complete Works of Aristotle (Princeton UP, 1984); and Truth, etc. (Clarendon Press, 2007); with J. Annas, The Modes of Scepticism (CUP, 1985); Early Greek Philosophy (Penguin, 1987); The Toils of Scepticism (CUP, 1990); The Cambridge Companion to Aristotle (CUP, 1995); and Porphyry: Introduction (Clarendon Press, 2003). He lives in France.

• Preface ; 1. Ancient philosophers ; 2. The history of philosophy ; 3. Philosophy within quotation marks? ; 4. Anglophone attitudes ; 5. Brentano's Aristotle ; 6. Heidegger in the cave ; 7. 'There was an old person from Tyre' ; 8. The Presocratics in context ; 9. Argument in ancient philosophy ; 10. Philosophy and dialectic ; 11. Aristotle and the methods of ethics ; 12. Metacommentary ; 13. An introduction to Aspasius ; 14. Parmenides and the Eleatic One ; 15. Reason and necessity in Leucippus ; 16. Plato's cyclical argument ; 17. Death and the philosopher ; 18. Aristotelian arithmetic ; 19. The principle of plenitude ; 20. 'Aristotle's opinion concerning destiny and what is up to us' ; 21. 'Belief is up to us' ; 22. The same again: the Stoics and eternal recurrence ; 23. Bits and pieces ; 24. Partial wholes ; 25. 'Drei Sonnen sahe ich': Syrianus and astronomy ; 26. Immaterial causes ; Bibliography ; Indexes